Creating social networking sites

Several names come into mind when I think of online services offering developers the tools to "create" their own social networking sites from piggybacking off their framework(s). One which has been in the media lately is Ning. From my experience with them, their services and frameworks do seem to give developers the ability to do interesting things; but the question I have is why?

As of yet, I haven't heard of any recognizable brands (Nike, Reebok, Walmart, Coca-cola, etc) who have successfully created a site that has gone critical mass. Yet even with this fact, social networking sites are still in demand by clients who genuinely feel that owning a social networking site is a viable business opportunity which they should invest in; they want to be the next Facebook.

Far be it for me to say that social networking sites are a poor investment decision, but an interesting fact about the web: Ashton Kutcher has almost 5 million subscribers. He doesn't own a website, let alone a social networking site. And as far as I know, I don't recall any recognizable brands like Walmart having even 1 million subscribers (website, RSS feeds, Twitter feed or otherwise); let alone 5 Million.

Feeds

When I was first introduced to RSS feeds, the purpose of it didn't make any sense to me. At the time, feed readers would essentially grab the feed and display the content. Each site had their own feed so even if I were to use a feed reader, I'd still need to go through 10 separate feeds to read my news. RSS never solved the issue with aggregation. In order to stay alive, they should have done two things:

1. A unified tagging scheme. Every website had their own way of producing RSS feeds and it was completely unnecessary. Unify the code!
2. Timestamping. Rather than creating an ambiguous date/time scheme, have all RSS carry a GMT stamp so that the client can determine the relative time.

These two things would have given users the ability to aggregate their feeds chronologically because for them to do this would have meant users could have gone to one place to get their news; they wouldn't need to click on 20 different "feed" buttons from a feed reader. And do you know what an aggregated feed reader that sorts its news postings chronologically? Twitter.

Sustainability

Last year, a number of tech blogs started to realize the reason why Twitter has had consistent disruptions to their service: over capacity due to Ruby on Rails. The framework that Twitter was built upon wasn't designed to be truly scaleable. At least, not to the degree where web users, cellphone users and media outlets have been slamming their servers. In light of this, it poses several questions which both relate to each other:

1. How to handle this dilemma?
2. How much will it cost?

Solving a problem like this is only limited to the budget they're willing to invest into it. Like a lot of people, I still have no clue as to how Twitter generates any revenue. They can get $100m from venture capitalists, but businesses with such explosive growth and no real sustainable business model begs to question how they intend to survive. Was Twitter built with the intention on being purchased?

Twittering

Several websites I frequent have been posting up ads to hire individuals to write/blog/tweet. What caught my attention about these ads were that they required applicants to have an initial base following. If you blog, you needed to prove you had x number of readers. If you tweet, you had to have x number of followers. I'm not completely familiar with the mechanics of it, but this sounds to me like these websites aren't as interested in "hiring" writers as they are looking more to purchase an audience base.